1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information handling systems and more particularly, to improving background initialization for information handling systems that support a fast rebuild operation.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
It is known to provide an information handling system with a storage system such as a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) storage system. In a RAID, a set of disks are organized into a single, large, logical disk. Each disk in the set typically has the same number of platters and the same number of tracks on each platter where the data is actually stored. The data is striped across multiple disks to improve read/write speeds, and redundant information is stored on the disks to improve the availability of data (reliability) in the event of catastrophic disk failures. The RAID secondary storage system can typically rebuild the failed data disk via a rebuild operation, without involving the file system, by regenerating each bit of data in each track and platter of the failed disk (using its knowledge of the redundant information), and then storing each such bit in corresponding locations of a new, replacement disk.
There are a number of issues relating to rebuild operations. For example, as disk capacity increases, the time to degraded volume increases and hence the time that a customer is exposed to possible loss of data due to additional disk drive failure increases. Also, rebuild operations often require 10 accesses to disk that means that host accesses to disk drives are affected resulting in degraded performance.
Known rebuild algorithms are not often aware of which blocks of a disk are in actual use (i.e., valid user data). Also, for parity based RAID systems, the number of operations for write and read operations increases significantly when the RAID virtual disk is degraded.
Also, with solutions that use of a fast rebuild operation, it is would be desirable to be able to provide a background initialization function so that a virtual disk is available soon after the virtual disk is created without waiting for a foreground initialization to complete.